Abstract
Keywords
This study addresses a problem that education researchers have long acknowledged, which is that school discipline in U.S. schools adversely affects African American and Latino boys and African American girls (Monroe, 2005; Morris, 2005; Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002; Vavrus & Cole, 2002). Despite calls to reform discipline policies and practices “so as to not disproportionately impact students of color, students with disabilities, or at-risk youth” (U.S. Department of Education, 2014, p. 4), overly harsh discipline of students of color persists (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). I frame discriminatory discipline as a problem of entrenched racism that leadership can address through the provision professional learning for teachers and staff. A beginning step is to help teachers make sense of discipline as a racialized phenomenon. Researchers who conduct sensemaking research “portray organizing as the experience of being in an ongoing, unknowable, unpredictable stream of experience in search of answers to the question ‘what’s the story?’” (Weick, Sutfcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 410). For this research, I sought to understand one school community’s search for answers to the question “what’s the story of our school’s racial discipline disparities?”
I conducted this research in a predominantly White diversifying suburban high school that served roughly 1,600 students. Specifically, I explored how a group of high school educators’ participation in race conscious sensemaking interventions produced a progressive effect of shifting their collective way of making sense of their school’s discipline disparities from race-neutral to one that recognized discipline as a racialized phenomenon (Monroe, 2005; Morris, 2005; Skiba et al., 2002). I found that providing diverse data types that reflected a range of racial perspectives within developmental learning contexts (Drago-Severson, 2009) offered cues that enabled organizational members to notice and partially disrupt the types of personal and organizational race-evasive tendencies that drive the reproduction of racial inequities in school discipline (Diamond & Lewis, 2016).
Drawing on Day, Gu, and Sammons’ (2016) notion of layering leadership approaches, I conceptualize race conscious sensemaking as a transformational leadership practice “underlayered” with culturally responsive leadership (Khalifa, Gooden, & Davis, 2016). This study contributes to administrative leadership theory and practice by advancing a sensemaking leadership approach for addressing the early stages of school discipline culture and climate improvement efforts. In particular, it illuminates the necessity and benefits of strategically fostering race consciousness in sensemaking processes. In what follows, I present a brief review of literature on racial disparities in discipline to establish the study need. Second, I present theoretical considerations that shaped the study design and analysis. Third, I present research design, data collection, and analysis procedures. Fourth, I present and discuss findings and implications.
Literature Review
Research on leadership practices that directly influence student outcomes makes it clear that effective instructional leadership requires approaches that also attend to organizational culture and climate (Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008). Negative organizational conditions and toxic climates, if left unaddressed, diminish the effectiveness of instructional leadership (Cosner & Jones, 2016; Day et al., 2016). Examples of these conditions include ineffective or underdeveloped data-use cultures (Sutherland, 2004), low capacities to handle racial conflict or tension (Cooper, 2009; DiAngelo, 2011), and discriminatory discipline cultures (Diamond & Lewis, 2016). Most leaders design school discipline policies and practices to achieve a dual goal of minimizing the potential occurrence of physical violence and promoting school safety and order. Fewer seek improvement through organizing teachers to confront the racialized nature of discipline culture and climate.
I use discipline culture to reference taken for granted ways organizational members behave in response to student (mis)behavior or what Diamond and Lewis (2016) refer to as performative organizational routines of discipline. Kupchik (2010) identifies four characteristics of counterproductive discipline cultures. First, adults overreact and cast a broad net about what constitutes school violence and misbehavior (Irby, 2014b). Second, adults generate solutions to discipline problems that focus on rules and adherence to procedural norms as opposed to root causes of misbehavior. Third, students and adults do not learn from disciplinary moments. Fourth, counterproductive discipline policies and practices exacerbate student misbehavior.
I use discipline climate in reference to organizational members’ collective perceptions of school discipline culture, campus (dis)order, feelings of safety, security, and belongingness. Negative climates exist when a gap emerges and persists between organizational members’ ostensive ideas about what discipline routines should be enacted and what discipline routines are actually enacted (Diamond & Lewis, 2016). Members of a school can lead, teach, and learn in a school with a discipline culture that members perceive as different, even divergent. Individuals make sense of organizational culture and climate based on their beliefs and experiences, group affiliations, and shared ideologies of justice and fairness that compete within the organizational system (Irby, 2014b). For school discipline, racial ideologies are paramount in shaping school leaders, teachers, and students’ symbolic (the meaning and values people attach to members of different racial groups) and structural (affecting who has access to certain kinds of resources) interactions and experiences (Diamond & Lewis, 2016).
Most school administrations use a combination of two overarching approaches to establishing discipline policies and practices. One approach to minimizing the potential of physical violence and promoting school safety and order is to apply severe consequences to high-level infractions such as fighting, drugs, and weapons possessions. This disciplinary approach proliferated in the era of zero tolerance (Irby, 2014b). Yet teachers spend most of their day-to-day discipline efforts addressing low-level, often subjective disciplinary incidents, which requires addressing low-level behaviors in an effort to maintain safety and order and deter the occurrence of violence (Irby, 2014b). Low-level discipline interactions require adults to regulate dress and appearance (Morris, 2005), promote adherence to traditional authority and social mores (e.g., reduce use of profanity), mitigate academic complacency (e.g., refusal to complete work), deter noneducative uses of cellphones and social media technologies, and reduce hallway hanging (Skiba et al., 2002). These sorts of subjective disciplinary moments adversely affect Black children more than any other groups (Skiba & Losen, 2015). Although low-level discipline problems pose minimal threats to students’ physical well-being and safety, when and if pervasive, they nonetheless foster a negative climate (Irby & Clough, 2015).
Teacher attempts to address low-level infractions often result in administrative office referrals, which lead to disproportionate suspensions, expulsions, or other forms of classroom removal experienced by Black students (Skiba et al., 2002). These racial patterns in discipline have persisted for decades. Twenty-plus years of research documents that racism is engendered in state- and district-level discipline policies (Fenning & Rose, 2007; Kafka, 2008), in racially toxic organizational cultures and climates (Kupchik, 2010), and in adults’ implicit racial biases, beliefs, and culturally incongruent adult–student interactions (Monroe, 2005; Morris, 2005; Skiba et al., 2002; Vavrus & Cole, 2002). Despite evidence that racism contributes to disparities in referrals, suspensions, and expulsions, practitioners often do not factor racism into their disciplinary thinking or consider their roles in the reproduction of racial discipline disparities (DeMatthews, Carey, Olivarez, Moussavi, & Saeedi, 2017; Gregory & Mosley, 2004).
There is a growing consensus that school discipline policies must achieve a third goal of equitable treatment of students that disrupts the production of racial discipline disparities. The school personnel who are in the best position to achieve this goal are administrators and teachers. Yet when researchers ask teachers and administrators how race and racism contributes to the co-construction of disciplinary moments (Vavrus & Cole, 2002) most respond in race-evasive, race-neutral, and color-blind ways that reinforce racially punitive approaches (DeMatthews et al., 2017; Findlay, 2015; Gregory & Mosley, 2004). The research literature suggests that race-neutral improvement approaches fail to disrupt racial discipline disparities. Still, most school discipline improvement approaches do not explicitly account for institutional racism and racial biases as endemic to discipline policies and practices. For example, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS)—a widely adopted tiered proactive school-wide framework for improving student behavior (Horner et al., 2009)—has been found to reduce the overall use of office referrals, suspensions, and expulsions in elementary school settings, but not discriminatory treatment of students of color (Skiba & Losen, 2015). Studies of PBIS’ effects in middle schools found that replacing reactive discipline with proactive supports reduced expulsion rates for Latinos and Native Americans, but not for Black students (Skiba & Losen, 2015).
Updated Culturally Responsive Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports models reflect attempts to correct past omissions of racial considerations (Bal, Kozleski, Schrader, Rodriguez, & Pelton, 2014). It is unclear if a focus on culture absent an explicit focus on race and racism obscures the well-documented evidence that racist school cultures drive the reproduction of disciplinary inequities (Gregory & Mosley, 2004; Losen & Skiba, 2010; Monroe, 2005; Morris, 2005; Morrison & D’Incau, 1997; Skiba et al., 2002; Vavrus & Cole, 2002). The failure of discipline improvement approaches to help educators account for racism, and the specific ways Whiteness and White identity shape disciplinary moments diminishes schools’ capacities to establish discipline cultures and climates that are essential to improving teaching and learning.
Theoretical Frames
Sensemaking
Sensemaking research explores how people socially construct meanings that create and sustain their framings and narratives of reality (Evans, 2007; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Weick et al., 2005; Whittle, Housley, Gilchrist, Mueller, & Lenny, 2015). People process cues, name past experiences, and bracket information about ongoing circumstances in a context-specific social process. Through sensemaking people develop cognitive images and narratives that rationalize decisions and actions (Weick et al., 2005). Sensemaking researchers adopt the position that organizational members do not merely respond and react to a wider reality that acts on them. They also draw from familiar frames and cues in their environments to create and sustain images of a wider reality (Weick, 1995). Sensemaking helps people organize chaos and flux by categorizing and simplifying their reality “when the current state of the world is perceived to be different from the expected state of the world, or when there is no obvious way to engage the world” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 409).
Sensemaking is distinct from decision making in that it is concerned with making retrospective meanings of experiences. Social actors use cues to do this. Cues are simple familiar structures that may include body language, conversational exchanges, and artifacts, as points of reference to make connections to additional frames. Meanings materialize and frameworks grow more complex when people talk or write “situations, organizations, and environments into existence” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 409). Sensemaking can have large consequences for organizational change because it is a precursor to decision making (Weick et al., 2005). Sensemaking processes ground action by enabling organizational members to achieve comprehension through turning circumstances into words and texts. Strategic leaders formalize these naturally occurring processes as a basis for improvement.
Leadership and Sensemaking
New demands of disciplinary programs to achieve the goal of racial equity constitutes an adaptive challenge (Heifetz, 1994). Adaptive change is required when problems are so complex that solutions are not readily available and therefore require development in the process of improving a school organization (Drago-Severson, 2009; Evans, 1996; Heifetz, 1994; Kegan & Lahey, 2009). When leaders and teachers take on adaptive challenges, feelings of uncertainty, incompetence, and loss ensue (Evans, 1996). Leaders should manage adaptive change by addressing school members’ developmental capacities, the “cognitive, affective, interpersonal, and intrapersonal capacities that enable people to better manage complexities of leadership, teaching, learning, and life that characterize 21st century life” (Drago-Severson, 2009, p. 8).
If one concedes that shifting punitive and racially discriminatory discipline to supportive and racially equitable discipline is an adaptive challenge, then leaders must offer professional development opportunities to cultivate teachers’ awareness of their individual and collective ways of knowing (Drago-Severson, 2009; Evans, 1996; Kegan & Lahey, 2009) about the reproduction of racial inequalities. For teachers to imagine and construct a racial reality where the goal of racially equitable discipline reform is plausible, they must construct a reality where race-visible ways of knowing disrupt the race-neutrality that dominates school discipline cultures.
Studies of leadership and sensemaking take two general forms. Some studies examine leader sensemaking (Evans, 2007) by focusing on how formal leaders make sense of organizational conditions. Others examine the discursive processes that leaders use to shape sensemaking opportunities for organizational members (Whittle et al., 2015). Both recognize the power and influence of school administrators to shape others’ sensemaking processes through framing, frame-breaking, reframing, and laying out visions of a desired reality (Weick et al., 2005; Whittle et al., 2015). Leadership facilitates sensemaking in exercising “control over cues, who talks to whom, proffered identities, criteria for plausible stories, actions permitted and disallowed, and histories and retrospect that are singled out” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 418), ignored, minimized, or left out.
Day et al.’s (2016) notion of layering leadership approaches is useful for conceptualizing the design and administration of race-conscious sensemaking opportunities as a transformational leadership practice “underlayered” with culturally responsive leadership (Khalifa et al., 2016) that aims to change teacher thinking and action. Transformational leadership practices develop individual and collective capacities to improve a range of school conditions by focusing on the internal states of organizational members as a lever for improvement (Day et al., 2016; Drago-Severson, 2009; Leithwood & Sun, 2012). Race conscious sensemaking constitutes transformational leadership practice because it requires anticipating, understanding, and transforming the fragile (DiAngelo, 2011) internal states of teachers and staff as a way to cultivate race-visible problem-solving capacities.
Culturally responsive leadership (CRL) centers on inclusion, equity, advocacy, and social justice in schools (Khalifa et al., 2016). The antiracist tenet of CRL emphasizes the role of leadership in surfacing “invisiblized” marginalization, resisting race-neutral policies, color-blindness, cultivating critical self-awareness, and critical consciousness. This CRL focus on antiracism, if and when enacted, works against the tendency for “school-wide attempts to raise student achievement to become stymied when people are unable or unwilling to talk about racialized patterns in test scores, graduation rates, and student discipline or racial conflict in interpersonal interactions” (Buehler, 2013, pp. 629-631). Offering race conscious sensemaking opportunities reflects a CRL practice because it surfaces invisiblized marginalization; cultivates critical self-awareness of race-evasive, race-neutral, and color-blind ideologies; and seeks to disrupt racially punitive discipline approaches (DeMatthews et al., 2017; Findlay, 2015; Gregory & Mosley, 2004).
Critical Perspectives on Whiteness
Second-wave White teacher studies is a strand of critical race in education research (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) that examines the cultural production of race, Whiteness, and White teacher identities through articulating complex historical and social forces along with related understandings of teaching and learning in context (Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016). I draw from this research because to critique and disrupt Whiteness, it must be visible. Whiteness is a location of structural advantage, a standpoint, and a cultural practice (Frankenberg, 1993). In the context of White supremacy, Whiteness structures the “social and material realities operating in the present moment that perpetuate racialized inequalities and injustices” (Jupp et al., 2016, p. 1154). Whiteness is a standpoint from which White folks look at themselves, at others, and society. It is the place from where White people imagine themselves as “good,” determine they are individuals, and blindly decide that where people land in life is a consequence of meritorious efforts. It is a structurally advantageous place where White people learn a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed (Frankenberg, 1993).
Finally, Whiteness is a cultural practice that includes employing emotional, ideological, and performative tools that maintain and enact White dominance (Picower, 2009; Yoon, 2012). These practices include thinking and proclaiming “I never owned a slave,” “racism is out of my control,” “I just want to help them,” and proposing personal remedies to structural inequities in the vein of “just be nice” (Picower, 2009) or helping others understand how to be just (Yoon, 2012). Whiteness as cultural practice is also reflected in White folks’ silence in the face of racial discomfort, avoidance of racial dilemmas, and withdrawal from situations where they feel subjected to racially motivated “attacks” (DiAngelo, 2011) or “threats” (Irby, 2014a).
White racial identity shapes the extent to which White folks see Whiteness as a structure, standpoint, and as a cultural practice that reifies (or partially disrupts) racialized inequities and injustices. I use White identity to reference the “multiple, intersecting, and (often) privileged race-evasive ways of conjugating White identities in the present moment” (Jupp et al., 2016, p. 1154). I concede that White folks possess problematic race-evasive identities and cultural practices. I also concede White “race-visible” identities so as to not totalize, reduce, or essentialize White identities to privileged race-evasive understandings (Jupp et al., 2016). As researchers critically analyze Whiteness and White identity, complex accounts of race-visible White folks within White race-evasive identities continue to emerge (Yoon, 2012). In simple terms, White racial identities and ways of knowing are less stable and more complex than often characterized. Hence, second-wave White teacher research offers useful concepts to explore sensemaking interventions as a way to make sense of race-visible ways of knowing in the context of a race-evasive organization.
Research Design and Procedures
I carried out this research over a 4-year period at Central Waters High, a predominantly White suburban school outside of a medium-sized city. Between 2000 and 2012, the school district rezoned its boundaries to incorporate segments of the neighboring city’s low-income African American communities. In this same period, the town of Central Waters’ population increased 59%. Latino families were the largest group of new residents. These factors changed the school’s demographics. According to the National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data in the 2000-2001 school year, 2% of the student population at the high school was Hispanic and 5% was African American. By 2012-2013, the total school population increased by 314 students to nearly 1,600. The Hispanic student population increased to 9%, and the African American student population increased to 10%. Two percent of students identified as two or more races. Students who identified as White decreased by 14.6%. Students of color comprised 25% of the school’s student body. Staff demographics did not follow changes in student demographics. There were no teachers of color on the staff in 2013, the year I began this research. Racial disparities in academic opportunities, achievement, special education placements, and discipline were prominent and grew with the school’s diversification. Black students were 13 times more likely than White students to be suspended from school.
Researcher Roles and Study Design
In the first year of the study, I collaborated with a team of three administrators: Elise, a White woman and district-level administrator responsible for overseeing the district’s discipline program; Carolyn, the school principal who is also a White woman; and Adam, a school psychologist and White man responsible for leading the PBIS program. My research team was comprised of a Black female associate professor, a White female doctoral student, and a Hmong female master’s student. We used a participatory design-based research approach to co-construct and examine learning interventions in a “naturalistic setting” (Sandoval & Bell, 2004). The administrators, research team, and I collected and analyzed data, and co-designed professional development and interventions. My research team produced and presented reports and research-based evidence to support the school’s equity improvement by feeding back what we learned from our school-based research, which informed iterative stages of organizational learning (ven den Akker, Gravemeijer, McKenney, & Nieveen, 2006).
Before I commenced the research project, Elise, Carolyn, and Adam were already implementing equity reforms. The reforms included increasing enrollment of students of color into Advanced Placement and college-track courses, access to extra-curricular offerings, reducing racial discipline disparities, and reducing the over-identification of Black students in special education. In December 2013 and January 2014, I conducted my first formal review of school discipline data. I also conducted informal conversational interviews, attended numerous meetings, and reviewed a range of documents to increase my understanding of the school’s challenges. I noted that organizational structures, capacities, and a collaborative learning culture required for improvement did not exist. I observed weak collaboration and low capacity for conflict. I also recognized that leaders based their discipline improvement strategies and decisions on narrow data sets comprised of mostly teacher generated discipline records.
After my initial observations, I recommended that school administrators expand and rethink their use of discipline data to include a broader range of perspectives. I also recommended that teachers, staff, and students participate in data collection, interpretation, and reporting. In March 2014, with our technical assistance, administrators and teachers surveyed the school using an adapted version of the U.S. Department of Education’s Safe Schools Healthy Students comprehensive school climate survey. A total of 129 adults and 1,228 students participated. My research team supported the data analysis and worked with administrators to identify areas of interest to share with all teachers and staff. We identified the following survey subscales in the student survey: General Climate; Perceptions of Adults; Feelings of Safety; School Problems; Personal Problems; Student Alcohol, Tobacco, and Drug Use; Punishment; and Socioemotional Supports. Cronbach’s Alpha reliability estimates for subscales ranged from .79 to .86. Three subdata types resulted from the administrative survey: student self-reports, adult perception reports, and student perception reports. We used the results to design sensemaking interventions with data cues that offered opportunities for racial learning.
Focus groups
I co-developed race-conscious sensemaking interventions to make the school community’s dominant race-neutral ways of knowing and race-evasive practices of school discipline visible for their own analysis. In April 2014, my research team and I conducted seven focus groups to gather 44 teachers’ perspectives on the school’s discipline culture and climate. We invited all teachers (approximately 160) and staff to participate. Twenty-eight percent agreed. All participants were White. Participant availability dictated group compositions. Each session lasted approximately 1 hour. We held all sessions at the school. During the first half of each focus group, we invited teachers to volunteer their thoughts, beliefs, and opinions about the school’s discipline culture and climate. After teachers responded to the initial prompt, we distributed discipline and climate survey data and summary reports, which served as racial cues. We read scripted statements to teachers comparing student responses across racial lines. We then asked teachers to “help us make sense of these findings.” Based on what we learned, we prepared a summary report of focus group themes that we shared with the entire school. We used the summary report to design the next sensemaking intervention, a data retreat.
Data retreat
The purpose of the July 2014 data retreat was to engage participants in collaborative data-focused problem exploration of their school’s discipline culture and climate problems. We invited all teachers, staff, and students to participate. A total of 22 teachers (14%), two district administrators, seven students, and five administrators (100%) participated. We held the data retreat over three 4-hour sessions on three sequential afternoons at the school. We collaborated with administrators to compile data packets that included summative academic data such as standardized test scores, Advanced Placement enrollments, and a range of other data related to academic and extracurricular involvement. We also provided climate survey and focus group data as shown in Table 1. These were all artifacts containing racial cues. Participants shown in Table 2 worked to complete individual, small group, and whole group learning activities focused on data interpretation, dialogue, and discussion. We concluded the retreat by asking participants to develop and discuss a root causes tree diagraming the problems the school should address to improve their discipline culture and climate. The final tree included four problems: unequal (student) access to school-based resources and opportunities, structural and relational inequities, racism and low competency for handling racial conflict, and a culture of poor communication.
Sensemaking Contexts and Cues (Data Types and Uses).
Note. ATOD = Student Alcohol, Tobacco, and Drug Use.
Retreat Participants.
Did not participate in focus group sensemaking.
Study Procedures
To understand how the sensemaking interventions shaped teachers’ collective racial ways of knowing, I conducted an ethnographic content analysis (Altheide, 1987) of 14 transcribed teacher focus group and data retreat exchanges. Ethnographic content analysis is a “hybrid” methodology that identifies patterns (quantitative) and discerns meanings (qualitative) across and within sets of unstructured textual, audio, and visual materials. I analyzed all focus group transcriptions. I examined three random retreat group conversations that occurred during the second day, three from the third day, and a whole group conversation that occurred during the last 2 hours of the retreat.
In each transcript, I coded based on how participants described problems. I explored questions such as: How do participants collectively describe the problem of racial disparities in discipline? What and whom do they suggest are the sources of the problems? What concepts and themes hang together in passages? How does this reflect emergent meaning making about their school’s discipline culture and climate problems? I also coded instances where participants disrupted race-neutral frames. Next, I coded to understand the ways that teachers’ sensemaking changed based on the types of data they referenced during the conversations. During focus groups, conversations revolved around the racial cues embedded in referral and climate survey data. During the retreat, the conversations stemmed from reviews of climate survey data, focus group data, and more racial cues (see Table 1). I then recoded all transcripts and explored counts and frequencies. Next I ran queries to build an understanding of the racial ways of knowing displayed in focus group and data retreat exchanges with an emphasis on data references and conversational cues central to the sensemaking processes of frame-breaking and reframing.
Findings: Mo’ Data, Mo’ Problems
Prior to offering sensemaking interventions, Central Waters High School leaders used PBIS as the organizational approach to reduce racial disparities. They reduced the number of reported incidents, referrals, suspensions, and expulsions but did not reduce the disproportionate punishment of Black students. Instead, White students were the primary beneficiaries of PBIS. School administrators made sense of these trends as a problem of racial discrimination. A majority of teachers did not. This rift between what qualified as “the reality” led to a deteriorating climate. Teachers directed blame for the changing culture and climate at administrators.
The more the administrators attempted to organize a school-wide discipline system, the more divergent perceptions and problem narratives emerged and solidified. A majority of teachers viewed disrespectful behaviors as a new crisis. The school lacked order. Lax rules undermined structure. Most of all, there were no consequences for misbehavior. The result was “students running the school.” This group of teachers and staff sensemaking was race-neutral and color-blind. They regarded administrators as lax on discipline, generally unresponsive, and “not doing anything” to improve student discipline. To this group, racial disproportion in discipline made sense because Black students misbehaved more often. To them, school-based data reflected this fact. After administrators and district leaders voiced concerns about the racial disparities, it set off a backlash. Administrators told us that teachers regularly lamented “there were no consequences” for misbehavior. Teachers shared this sentiment with us in one-on-one conversations and focus groups. We heard it expressed during observations. Teachers and staff believed that the way to solve the school’s problems was to establish clearer rules, communicate the rules to students, and consistently enforce consequences when students broke them.
The district’s leaders, high school administrators select counselors, psychologist, and a small group of teachers viewed the discipline problems as a reason to become more responsive to the new racial, cultural, and class demographics of the student body. They did not view the behaviors as indicative of some new and unique problem. Nor did they characterize the school as out of control. This group was less nostalgic about the “good old days” that many teachers described when they talked about the orderliness of years past. They admitted that student disrespect and defiance were problematic, but did not regard it as unique, new, or warranting more severe consequences. They viewed student defiance as generational and related to social media over-exposure. They believed teachers should handle most typical discipline problems and that teachers overused office referrals and removals. They felt Black students’ misbehaviors were targeted. They considered racial bias and discrimination as endemic to the school’s discipline culture and climate. They were racially aware but race-evasive in their behaviors.
This group that regarded the problem as a racialized one based their analysis on data too. Yet they often talked about racial and cultural disparities using racially ambiguous terms such as our new students and our kids that are bussed in. They had little to offer in terms of solutions, research, or best-practices to challenge their more nostalgic counterparts who called for punitive, compliance-oriented discipline approaches. Although they talked candidly about their beliefs about the racism in the school to my research team and I, our observations suggested that they rarely, if ever, talked openly with colleagues who did not share their beliefs. In other words, despite the divergent racial ideologies that circulated within the school community, race-neutrality dominated the public life of the school. By the 2013-2014 school year, school administrators were making a concerted effort to improve the educational experiences and outcomes of Black and Latino students by focusing more explicitly on disrupting racism. Prior to the interventions, there were no formal opportunities for members of the organization to learn from one another about race and racism.
Diverse Data as Cues for Racial Learning
Introducing organizational members to racially representative quantitative and qualitative data enabled participants to expand their frames for analyzing problems to include Whiteness (a racial structure) and White identity (privileged and evasive) while lessening their attributions of problems to factors further removed from their spheres of influence. Table 3 presents the raw counts and percentages of talk-types that characterized the focus group and retreat exchanges and reveals clues into participants’ sensemaking. I underlined problem frames that dominated each sensemaking event. Although specific problem frames are important, the combined frames reveal two distinct ways of knowing. During focus groups, participants overwhelmingly attributed discipline problems to the school’s five-person administrative team, ineffective policies and structures beyond their control, and toward students. Personal anecdotes and vicarious experiences dominated how people retrospectively justified their actions (and inactions). Their discussions about relationships and belongingness were prominent, but did not reflect a level of personal commitment to strengthening relationships. The dominant way of knowing was race-neutral and outwardly focused on “others” as responsible for problems.
Patterns and Shifts in Conversational Exchanges.
During the retreat, the conversations contained more race-specific language and reflected an increased use of evidence beyond personal perspectives. Participants referenced data and evidence more often, especially student-generated quantitative and qualitative data. Fear and anxiety emerged as a prominent frame to make sense of discipline culture and climate problems. Although references about Black students remained the same, references to White identities increased. A partially race-evasive and partially race-visible way of knowing that recognized Whiteness (e.g., low expectations, fear, and anxieties) as a way for making sense of discipline culture and climate problems emerged during the retreat. This emergent racialized way of knowing disrupted many previously held plausible explanations for disparities. In what follows, I offer an extended focus group and an extended retreat exchange that exemplify the distinct ways of knowing. I point to patterns in the retreat exchanges that reflect the emergence of race-visible frames. In both excerpts, participants talked about the general lack of consistency of rule enforcement in the school. In particular, they focused on the challenges of defiance and hallway behaviors.
Call the Administrator? What’s He Going to Do?
I present this first excerpt “Call an Administrator?! What’s he going to do?” because it exemplifies teachers’ emphases on administrators and teachers as responsible for discipline problems. It occurred in a focus group conversation among six teachers and staff, three of whom continued their participation in the data retreat. Melissa Stroder began by expressing frustration with the unclear cell phone use guidelines and lack of administrative support. Almost all participants named these problems.
The whole cell phone crap is out of control. I’ve had administrators come in. If a kid refuses to give up the phone, there’s nothing they can do about it. As soon as the administrator leaves, the phone is out again. I’ve never had problems in the past like now. I feel very unsupported.
Do you feel like it’s because you know that if a kid gets sent out that there’s no consequence for them?
Yeah. Someone [a student] told me last week “What are you going to do? Call an administrator? What’s he going to do?”
These sorts of exchanges typified teacher focus group conversations. Melissa’s comments reflected her deep frustration with school administrators and students, but revealed little about her own practice. Although Melissa acknowledged administrators could not take students’ cell phones, she did not describe cell phone use as a shared problem pervading the school. She did not consider administrators’ struggles to manage cell phone technology use in the school. Her focus was on how others caused her problems. Kelly, a teacher, explained cell phones as a classroom management issue and owned her role in addressing it:
I take cell phones on myself. That’s fairly discretionary for teachers. Relying on outside or other systems is frustrating and does not work completely for those things. I prefer to make those agreements within my class. Is that what we’re talking about when we say discipline? Where I tend to start getting lost is what is system discipline versus your own discipline?
I would agree. In my classroom, things are relatively well-managed. But I’m lucky because I’ve got motivated kids. But in my hall walking, I pleasantly ask kids “where should you be?” and get cursed at as a first response. If I try to get them to the office there’s really no consequence from the administrators that I’ve ever seen. I ask [administrators] “Okay, so what happened?” and I never hear back about the results or the outcome with that particular student.
Kelly acknowledged the lack of clarity concerning responsibilities. She concluded by posing a question that had the potential to lead to a philosophical conversation. But her colleague Rebecca shifted the conversation away from classroom issues to her frustration with students in the hallways. The pivot beyond the classroom sphere of control was common, as exemplified in Rebecca’s acknowledgement, followed by a sudden change of topic. The concern with hallway misbehaviors, rowdiness, and general lack of student compliance and respect for teachers was a dominant focus group theme. Rebecca considered herself lucky to have “motivated kids,” and suggested that her successful classroom management was in large part because of whom she teaches. She described her own hallway interactions as pleasant, and echoes Melissa’s concern that administrators do not follow through despite her best intentions. Following up on these two themes of classroom management and hallway management, Amanda shared her perspective:
When I first started teaching here 19 years ago, I was assigned lower level classes than I’m assigned now. I had way more problems than I do now. To me, it seems like it depends on the group of students that I’m working with. Part of what I do also is look at data in the school. I see disproportion in our AP classes, but also across the entire school and I guess maybe that’s sort of skewed my perception, too. Reminds me of the phrase school within a school.
Like Rebecca, Amanda acknowledged that she had fewer problems because of the students in her class. But earlier in her career, “lower level” classes were a more difficult group of students, and 19 years ago, many of the students were likely White. In addition to classroom teaching, Amanda serves as the school’s data specialist. Unlike others in the conversation who only personalized their problems, Amanda hinted that larger institutional dynamics were at work. The school maintained different learning environments and opportunities for different students. This caused distinct classroom management challenges for different teachers. The halls were an equal opportunity zone that did not insulate teachers based on the student tracking. Amanda continued to talk about the larger structural challenges that accompanied school growth and Melissa queried about which students were “typically” in the hallways.
I think one of the underlying features is that the school has just gotten bigger. It’s gotten more diverse, but it’s also just gotten bigger. Whenever you get bigger, there’s just more anonymity and that’s why I feel like students are able to swear [at] teachers. Because there’s no accountability if there’s no relationship. I walk down the hallway all the time and if I approach a student I don’t know, I do not get good responses. But if I strike up a conversation with that kid, I will get a very different response.
I’m curious about who’s out in the halls?
This morning there were a lot of students of color walking in the halls.
How about you Kathy, when you’re in the hall, for the most part?
I would say it’s about equal. I have spoken to both groups of kids, individual kids of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Some of all groups are respectful. Some of them are right back in your face. I’ve had as many White girls swear at me as I’ve had Black guys swear at me. It’s a fairly equal opportunity.
Amanda’s multiframed analysis of diversity and growth in the student population opened up a possibility for new understandings. Although her observations that the school had grown in population and diversity were not novel, her suggestion that growth and diversity led to a “school within a school” was. Melissa, an English Language Learners teacher, shared this same concern later in the conversation. After reviewing student survey responses, she explained that “all of my students are Brown” and that their ethnicity influences how poorly some teachers treat them. Melissa was outspoken about race and racism. She and numerous other participants described “pockets of belonging” within the school where students of color preferred to spend their time. Yet in her initial discussion of discipline problems, she did not openly acknowledge her students’ race or ethnicity. It was only after Melissa had data to “support” her claims that she shared her understanding of why her racially minoritized students responded as they did.
If Kelly had not called swearing at teachers in the hallways “a fairly equal opportunity option” among all students, White students, White girls in particular, and Whiteness would have remained invisiblized in the discussion. Amanda’s observation from “this morning” established an initial framing of hallway misbehavior as a problem with students of color. But Kelly’s comment, which was not time bound to “this morning,” that White girls and Black guys cursed at teachers offered a race-visible reframing that problematized Whiteness alongside the normative problematization of Blackness (which never subsided). Still, given the proportionally small number of Black students who attended the school, the fact that the numbers in the hallway was “about equal” should be nonetheless concerning. As teachers and staff continued their sensemaking conversations it became increasingly evident the faculty and staff’s behaviors and framings reified the school’s discipline culture and climate because they rarely placed their White selves into the problem frames. We used what we learned from focus groups to design a data retreat that allowed teachers and staff to continue their exploration of problems.
“We’re Going Around the Fact of Racism”
I lifted the sample excerpt “We’re Going around the Fact of Racism” from a whole group conversation that occurred during the final 2 hours of the data retreat. The speakers in the exchange include Jennifer, Mary, Adam, Kari, and Wesley. With the exception of Adam, who is an administrator, all participants also volunteered for focus groups. Prior to the following exchange, all spent the previous two days reviewing and discussing data outlined in Table 1. In the final conversations, concerns about unclear expectations and problematic hallway behaviors resurfaced. Jennifer, an English teacher, started the conversation by speaking about the racialized and discriminatory nature of adult expectations of students:
I really feel there are different expectations for students. I’ve heard too many comments [that suggest things like using the word] b*tch is “just black culture, they talk like that.” I’ve heard too many comments similar in tone in my 6 years here. My children are biracial. If my kids were to ever walk through a hallway and cuss or whatever and no adult addressed them because the assumption was “well they’re Black and that’s just how Black kids act” you’re not doing my kids any favors. You’re harming them actually. That’s happening here.
Jennifer’s commentary points to the idea that teachers, staff, and administrators held lower behavioral expectations for Black children as a White cultural norm. She directed her pointed use of “you” toward White colleagues. Mary agreed in a race-evasive manner:
I think the same is true for the dress code. Certain students are just allowed to violate the code because no one wants to go there [with them].
Although Mary conceded Jennifer’s point, her use of “certain students” and “no one” de-racialized the conversation. Her generalization that “no one” wants to act reflected an attempt to reestablish normative White racial solidary, which Jennifer had disrupted. Her cues diminished the potential of advancing race-visible and self-reflective sensemaking. Each of the participants likely held different, perhaps racialized and gendered, images about who Mary meant by “certain students.” Teachers, staff, and leaders can do little to push one another’s racial learning if individual’s images and thoughts remain private or nonspecific because they remain unavailable for questioning, analysis, or critique. To activate racial learning in the moment, someone would need to ask questions such as “Who do you mean by ‘certain’?”
Another important feature of Mary’s comment was the statement that “students are just allowed to violate the code.” Her statement was a passive race-evasive acknowledgement that someone, perhaps adults, allowed students to violate the dress code. It did not reflect ownership of the problem. Then Adam asked a question that cued the importance of adult self-reflectiveness. Kari’s response re-racialized the conversational frame:
So if we’re asking questions, I want to ask you all, why don’t people want to go there?
I don’t know why people don’t want to go there [several people laugh]. But we’re kind of going around the fact of racism. I know from whatever training I went to that research supports racism [as a factor] even when you control for factors such as socio-economics. They’re still left with racism. It exists and it exists in this school. That’s the thing. It’s not going to be fun. It’s not going to be nice. Its going to require us to be brave. It will feel good as long as we keep saying all this stuff [not related to race]. Every single one for making us have our stuff. We all have our white privilege. We’ve got to do something about that. And that’s what I see [referencing data packet]. It’s unpleasant. But students can pick up on it.
In response to Adam’s question, Kari elevated a race-conscious frame making sense of adult inaction and low expectations. Referencing racism opened up the exchange to exploring racially conscious perspectives that were not publicly available when participants used race-neutral language. Wesley, an art teacher, used the opening to deepen the group’s racial analysis by sharing his own practice of disciplinary conflict avoidance:
Fear is part of it too. I have been in situations where I will ask students to take their headphones off and put them away, and then I ask this [different] student to take their headphones off and put them away, and that kid says you’re just picking on me because I’m Black. And that makes me afraid, because I don’t want to be perceived as being something I’m not. So for me, this is just sort of who I am. I’m much more likely to be like “well I’m not going to do that again.” I don’t want to be accused of being racist. That’s hard for me to say. I don’t like to admit that. But it’s true.
Wesley expressed how his racial anxiety manifested in a disciplinary practice of avoidance and disengagement. His action stemmed from his investment in maintaining a sense a White non-racist self. Here, Wesley’s race-visible language mattered. His first utterances, “students” and “this student” were race-neutral. But his disclosure that “this student” was Black revealed a racialized event that, had he not used specific racial language, would be unavailable for the group’s collective racial learning and analysis. His specificity opened up a space to explore Whiteness as an ideological investment in not being racist. It also revealed a culture of racial conflict avoidance.
The racial disciplinary moment was not solely Wesley’s fault. One Black student co-produced it with him. His decision to disengage was his own. Once he decided to prioritize his risk aversion over the student’s compliance with an expectation of no headphones use in class, his subsequent inaction produced a discriminatory effect of low expectations for other Black students. The paradox is that avoidance would seem to lead to fewer racial disparities in outcomes. Yet evoking Whiteness rationalizes referrals because the cultural practice of avoidance accumulates into frustration that deteriorates climate. Beyond one individual event, if teachers use racial conflict avoidance as a routine practice with Black students beyond the one, it lays the ground for low expectations for more Black students. Jennifer expressed this early in the conversation. Office referrals make sense where avoidance meets low expectations and weak relationships. Patricia picked up where Wesley left off, but retreated from his race-visible problem framings:
Speaking personally, I don’t address many behaviors because I don’t have the same relationship with all students. I have no problem when a student that I know walks by and drops the f-bomb or does whatever, I’ll say “hey you’re not just going to go by and . . .” I’ll have that conversation. Students that I don’t know, whether they’re black, white . . . I tend not to know many of the black students or minority students. But in the hallway it’s just moving people dropping the f-bomb.
Patricia’s comments differed from Wesley’s in that she did not view her Whiteness in relation to discipline disengagement. Her pivot characterized a common capitulation from race-visible to race-neutral talk. Despite her acknowledgement of race, she characterized the problem as related to school size and minimized the significance of racism. She did not account for the plausibility that she knew fewer Black and minority students than White students because of structural racism. Her framing and race-evasive retreat from racial analysis revealed her limited capacity to see patterns of racial segregation within the school that stemmed from academic tracking, differential student access to extra-curricular activities, and lack of structures to cultivate adult–student relationships across race. The exchanges presented in this section, although seemingly small, shifted the school from a reliance on race-neutral and race-evasive ways of making sense to ones that explicitly acknowledge discipline as a racialized phenomenon.
After the retreat, a volunteer group of participants formed themselves into a team who used their learning experiences and emergent ways of knowing to develop professional learning opportunities for their colleagues. The sensemaking shifts catalyzed school-wide equity discussions. In particular, the race-conscious narratives drove subsequent school-wide data analysis and discussion routines. By year 3 of improvement efforts, race-visible understandings competed with race-neutral ones as a public and legitimate way of talking about discipline culture and climate.
Discussion: Mo’ Data, Mo’ Ways of Knowing Problems
The study findings contribute to school discipline, leadership, and critical race in education research by showing how the strategic use of race-conscious professional development can instigate the disruption of punitive and discriminatory discipline at the point of sensemaking. The findings revealed participants’ capacities to speak about race, racism, and Whiteness in relation to their schools’ discipline culture and climate problems related to the racialized data cues embedded in the sensemaking interventions. The more teachers paid attention to data cues, the more they “saw” Whiteness as a point of critique and analysis. They also framed problems in manners that reflected the racial reality of their circumstances. Although the sensemaking events increased the possibility for race-visible identities to emerge (i.e., “We’re Going around the Fact of Racism”), it is unclear if the desirability of race-visible identities followed. Rather, race-visible identities emerged and interplayed with race-neutral ones.
My analytic focus on shifts, changes, and interplays in White teachers’ collective racial thinking about school discipline adds nuance to research that focuses on racial frames as relatively stable ways of knowing. For example, DeMatthews and colleagues’ (2017) study of administrators discipline ideologies yielded belief categories—overt racial justifiers, rigid rule enforcers, and flexible cognizant disciplinarians—that shed light into why administrators made particular disciplinary decisions. Evans (2007) study of how leaders make sense of race in the context of shifting demographics illuminated how principals framed race, racial situations, and made leadership decisions based on these framings. With this study, I portrayed people’s experiences talking—deconstructing and co-constructing—their reality to better understand shifts and changes in racial thinking. My focus on shifts and changes implies leadership of teacher learning plays a role in improving discipline culture and climate. Giving people sensemaking opportunities can help people shift the own and others’ ways of knowing (Weick et al., 2005; Whittle et al., 2015) or belief categories, through frame-breaking, reframing, and challenging the dominant ways of making sense of their past and present circumstances.
In the retreat, Jennifer, broke a racially benevolent cultural competence frame that rationalized allowing Black students to swear unchecked. She reframed her colleagues’ liberal White thinking as low expectations for Black children. She challenged White solidarity when she identified herself as a mother to bi-racial children, a move that signaled the precarious state of White racial solidarity (DiAngelo, 2011; Irby, 2014a). Her disclosure was also a performative tool of Whiteness that sexualized antiracism and therefore positioned her was adamant about the success of Black children (Picower, 2009). Participants challenged Whiteness through probing questions such as “why don’t people want to go there?” and direct statements such as “we’re kind of going around the fact of racism.” They also acknowledged their own fragility with statements such as “I don’t like to admit but . . .” and “that’s hard for me to say.” Such moments reflected increased stamina to talk about racial conflict, dilemmas, and anxieties. Participants drew on the increased stamina to speak a reality into existence where Whiteness was visible for analysis and available to talk about and to learn from.
Teachers’ uses of cues, frame-breaking talk, and re-framing talk called their past reality into direct question. They confronted the narratives that White teachers were victims of administrative neglect and student disregard and that the school as out of (White) control. As they talked Whiteness into their problem frames, fear emerged as a prominent feature of conversations. Participants described a professional culture of racial conflict avoidance. However, with rare exception, such as when Wesley said “I don’t like to admit that,” they did not take up avoidance as a problematic cultural practice. Their desires to maintain psychological comfort and uphold images as good nonracist White people rationalized their individual and collective avoidance. I point out these shifts between race-neutral, race-evasive, and race-visible identities to suggest that teachers can learn to think about discipline in racial terms. But as Jupp et al. (2016) note, a racist/ally binary and perhaps other categories are insufficient for understanding the ways White antiracism is learned.
Understanding how teachers learn about the racialization of discipline is critically important because if administrators and teachers are unable to develop racial lenses for disciplinary problem solving (Carter, Skiba, Arredondo, & Pollock, 2017), it is unlikely schools will develop the discipline cultures that can achieve the goal of racial equity. A fifth characteristic of a counterproductive discipline culture that became apparent in this research is race-neutrality and the inability of organizational members to understand the racial implications of discipline. Given this fifth counterproductive tendency, school leaders must provide developmental learning opportunities that makes racism visible within their schools (Khalifa et al., 2016) in a manner that is safe and challenging (Drago-Severson, 2009).
Leadership facilitates sensemaking through an intentional commitment to control cues, extend the range of plausible identities, and single out histories and retrospect that are important (Weick et al., 2005). The race-conscious intervention designs and implementations constitute leadership practice. Central Water’s leaders offered sensemaking that presented racially representative cues, treated teachers as racialized subjects who possessed cultures and beliefs that could (and should) be challenged, and anticipated the inner states of its organizational members. Designed as such, the interventions reflected transformational leadership approaches that also surfaced “invisiblized” marginalization, disrupted race-neutral thinking, color-blindness, and cultivated critical self-awareness (Khalifa et al., 2016). I would not characterize the contexts explored in this study as cultivating critical consciousness. Nonetheless, the teachers engaged in racial learning through co-constructing a different reality than what many teachers initially considered plausible: that the problem with their school’s discipline culture and climate was in reality a problem of race and racism.
Conclusion
This study situated school discipline research at the intersections of transformational leadership, culturally responsive leadership, and second-wave White teacher studies. I portrayed structured sensemaking opportunities as one way to initiate shifts in organizational members’ ways of knowing about the role race, racism, and Whiteness plays in the reproduction of racial inequities in discipline. School discipline policies and practices should not be discriminatory toward students of color. Yet they have been and continue to be. An identified shortcoming in school discipline research is its emphasis on how educators think about discipline at the expense of understanding how educators’ thinking about discipline changes. This study addresses this weakness by suggesting that leaders should and can actively facilitate teacher learning that changes teachers’ ways of knowing. This study demonstrates what this might entail through portraying the complexities that emerged as White teachers searched for answers to the question “what’s the story of our school’s racial discipline disparities?” Four considerations are important for leading this type of learning. First, leaders should consider race-neutrality a characteristic of counterproductive discipline cultures. Second, leaders should anticipate teachers’ fragility and employment of tools of Whiteness and thus create developmental learning opportunities that productively challenge race-evasive identities and race-neutral ways of knowing. Third, leadership efforts to improve discipline absent organizational learning that aims to disrupt racism and racial biases will allow discriminatory discipline cultures to persist. Fourth, addressing discriminatory discipline is an important step in establishing organizational conditions that make instructional leadership for student learning more likely to take root (Cosner & Jones, 2016; Day et al., 2016).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.